By Ariane Genillard
The Eurobond market in its heyday was rich in myths, none richer than the origin myths around the first issue by Autostrade in 1963.
The Italian government had committed to building a major toll road, but did not have the means to finance it. At the same time, the balance of dollars held outside America had been increasing, driven partly by the Interest Equalisation Tax introduced by the Kennedy administration. Siegmund Warburg, a banker brilliant and difficult in equal measures, had the genius idea of linking the two by issuing a $15m "Eurobond". So much for the official myth.
But SG Warburg, the bank Warburg had founded in London, had a problem. It had no idea how to distribute the bonds, as a result of which this first issue almost failed.
So he turned to the European managing partner of White Weld, Robert Genillard, or Bob as he had been widely known in finance from his earlier days on Wall Street. Warburg saw that this relatively young Swiss financier did know how to sell the paper and to get things done.
At the end of each day, when this issue, and subsequent ones arranged by SG Warburg, were in the market, Warburg would call Bob at home and ask one question: "So, how many bonds did you sell today?"
When Bob could answer that all the Autostrade paper had been placed, Warburg asked what he could offer as a reward and Bob dutifully replied that his firm's policy was that he could not accept a gift worth more than $1 (as Bob liked to say, "those were different times"). Warburg said he would find him an original dollar — a silver thaler issued by the Holy Roman Empire. Bob never received the thaler.
It had started less auspiciously. Genillard came from a family of Swiss hoteliers, who had built one of the first palace hotels in the Alps and then been wiped out financially by the First World War and the Spanish influenza which followed it.
An only child, he spent the war years as a schoolboy in Lausanne with his English mother. As soon as possible after the war he got a passage across the Atlantic, where he found a job in a Pepsi bottling plant in New Jersey while he took night classes. He then talked his way into a junior job at White Weld, then one of the leading white-shoe brokerages on Wall Street.
There his first big break came when they asked him to go to Venezuela and see what business was to be done there. Venezuela was in the early stages of an oil-driven boom, of which Genillard took full benefit. Soon, he was making more money than some of the senior partners in New York, and he was invited to move back to New York as a full partner in White Weld.
Next, he was asked to move to Europe in 1960 to see what might be happening there. Having successfully positioned White Weld as the leading distributor of Eurobonds, he was approached by Rainer Gut at Credit Suisse, a contemporary who had become a friend when they were both young Swiss in New York at the start of their careers.
Out of this conversation, Credit Suisse White Weld was born. When Merrill Lynch acquired the US operations of White Weld, Genillard replaced it with First Boston, creating Credit Suisse First Boston, which went on to dominate the Euromarkets for the next decade.
Genillard had a great nose for talent. Those who worked for him at White Weld included most of the best known people in the Euromarkets: Michael von Clemm, Stanislas Yassukovich, John Stancliffe and John Craven all worked with him at White Weld. Hans-Joerg Rudloff, widely known in the late 1980s as the 'King of the Euromarkets', was hired by Genillard from Kidder Peabody.
Having created the market leader in the Euromarkets and also set up a private bank, Clariden, which was subsequently acquired by Credit Suisse, Genillard moved on in the 1980s to become a successful industrialist.
For 10 years he was the CEO of Thyssen-Bornemisza Group, a sprawling conglomerate which he may have saved by getting it out of ship-making in northern Europe and creating in its place a collection of diversified long term investments in operating businesses.
In later life, Genillard served on many corporate boards, including at Credit Suisse, Novartis, American Express and Corning, where his wisdom and discretion were much appreciated.
However, what kept him young and alive right until the end were his love of his family — the wife to whom he was married for 60 years and five children, all of whom survive him — and his fascination with the world and what might happen next.
Just as he had spotted that emerging markets might be interesting in the 1950s and that the Euromarket would be the biggest emerging market of them all the following decade, more recently he had become a deeply knowledgeable user of technology.
The day before he died, when he knew the end was near, he updated the software on his iPhone and took glee in spotting the bugs in it.